Following the 1992 GOP convention, FAIR's magazine Extra! (11/92) highlighted remarks made by Rich Bond in which the then-Republican national chair explained the strategy behind the right's relentless charges of liberal media bias:

There's some strategy to it. I'm the coach of a kids' basketball team and Little League Teams. If you watch any great coach, what they try to do is "work the refs." Maybe the ref will cut you a little slack next time.

In a recent appearance on MSNBC's Hardball With Chris Matthews (10/19/09), Pat Buchanan gave a first-hand account of how the strategy paid off for him and at least one other member of the Nixon administration:

BUCHANAN: I know when we hit the New York Times, for example, in the '60s, all of a sudden, they blossomed with an op-ed page that had some conservatives on it and conservative voices there, and all the other newspapers did, as well.

MATTHEWS: That's how you got Bill his job. Is that how you got Bill Safire his job?

[LAUGHTER]

BUCHANAN: Well, listen, they went out looking for conservative--that's how I got my job! Create a vacuum out there and a real demand, you've got to put these people on, Chris, and go to work and....

Like Bond, Buchanan acknowledges that the ploy is disingenuous: In a Los Angeles Times interview (3/14/96) during his 1996 campaign for president, Buchanan praised the media for fairness: "I've gotten balanced coverage and broad coverage.... For heaven sakes, we kid about the liberal media, but every Republican on Earth does that."

And of course it helps that the corporate media is acutely sensitive to charges of liberal bias--regardless of whether they are true or not.

"It is difficult to overstate President Obama's unpopularity in most of Louisiana," writes Campbell Robertson in a front-page New York Times article  (9/11/09). Yet Robertson managed to pull it off.

Robertson continues: "He lost handily to Senator John McCain here, picking up only 14 percent of the white vote. (The state is roughly two-thirds white.)" Fourteen percent? Wow, that is unpopular! But given that black and other non-white people have been able to vote in Louisiana for several decades now, wouldn't it make sense to give the actual share of the vote Obama received? That would be 40 percent, which is a pretty disappointing electoral result, but Obama did worse in six other states--and McCain did as bad or worse in 12 states. Yet it would be pretty easy, I would think, to overstate McCain's unpopularity in, say, Maine.

The problem here is treating white opinion as representative of the opinions of the public at large. ("In Louisiana, Tainted Senator Rides Anti-Obama Sentiment" is the print headline.) It's a subtler form of the crude analysis Chris Matthews used to do when Obama was running for the Democratic nomination: "How's he connect with regular people? Does he? Or does he only appeal to people who come from the African-American community?"

The Times piece is mainly about the re-election prospects of Sen. David Vitter, but it takes time out for a look back at a recent special election race for a Louisiana State Senate seat. The lone Republican in the three-way race bashed his opponents with a flier--which accompanies the story as a graphic--featuring a smiling hippie and the text, "You might be a liberal if you...voted for Barack Obama." But the punchline of the story is that one of the Democrats beat the Republican in the runoff election, 54 percent to 46 percent, which would seem to undercut the story's contention that Obama is to Louisiana voters as garlic is to vampires. But the next line in Robertson's story is, "So given Louisiana's increasingly reddish hue, the prevailing political wisdom is that a real threat to Mr. Vitter would come from his right." Illustrating the old journalism adage: Don't let the facts get in the way of a good story.

David Gregory, host of NBC's Meet the Press (3/1/09):

The Obama stimulus package, $787 billion. The housing plan, $75 billion. That's $2.3 trillion.  Seven hundred and fifty billion dollars additional in this document for additional bailout money for the banks. Meantime, what metric do we have to see how people--what people think of that government intervention? The Dow is one metric.  It closed on Friday at its lowest level since 1997, just over 7,000.

The Dow is not a measure about what "people" think about government policies. It's a measure of what the tiny, elite group of people who trade stocks think stocks are worth, which is to say what they think other people would pay for them. These evaluations have little to do with the long-term health of the economy. In some cases, a declining stock market might be good news for the economy, particularly if stock prices have been unrealistically inflated.

If you want to find out what people in general actually think about President Obama's economic policies, a better way to do so is to ask a statistically representative sample of them. Such efforts generally provide much more positive results than the Dow Jones "metric."

Someone whose feelings you can predict based on what the Dow does, though, is Gregory's NBC colleague Chris Matthews. When stocks go down, Chris Matthews gets mad. Here he is a couple of weeks ago (Hardball, 2/23/09):

I want to ask you when we get back, how does he deal with the fact that he has a scorecard now. It's called the Dow Jones. Every day now--first of all, they're going to nationalize the banks. Then they're not going to nationalize the banks. No matter what they say, the Dow keeps going down. It's down to almost 7,000 now. I used to think 8,000 was the floor. It's heading toward 6,000! People are really getting angry! I'm getting angry!

People have saved money, who are facing retirement, are ripped right now. It's absolutely disturbing, to put it lightly, what this must be saying to people who are retired now. They have a nest egg, a 401(k) that's now a 101(k). They are ripped. I'm only saying it the nice way. They are really angry and they're going to get mad at him if we don't get this market turned around.

We'll be right back with Howard Fineman and see how the president does with his scorecard, and Gene Robinson, can he deal with that Dow Jones scorecard every day in decline?

If you're pulling down a multi-million salary like Chris Matthews, you probably invest quite a bit of it and therefore you might have a lot to lose when the stock market goes down. Your personal losses don't turn the Dow Jones into a "scorecard" for the president, however.

Leave it to Forbes to get someone from the Hoover Institution to do an "in-depth" feature on "The 25 Most Influential Liberals in the U.S. Media" (1/22/09).

The results are about as bogus as you might imagine, including a number of people who are not only not liberals, but who are actively loathed by the actual left end of the media spectrum--and the feeling is generally mutual: folks like Fred Hiatt, Thomas Friedman, Fareed Zakaria, Christopher Hitchens (did their Nation sub lapse in 1998?), Maureen Dowd, Chris Matthews and Andrew Sullivan.

Then there are some corporate journalists whose "liberalism" seems entirely resume-based: Kurt Andersen founded Spy and does a culture show on NPR! David Shipley wrote speeches for Bill Clinton and works at the New York Times! Gerald Seib works at the Wall Street Journal but doesn't write for the editorial page! Andersen is the kind of "liberal" who writes about "the Democrats' 'mommy party' M.O. of naivete, mollycoddling, and profligacy," Seib does pieces like "Bipartisanship Could Help Victorious Democrats," while Shipley's Times op-ed page has been the object of repeated complaints from FAIR for its right-slanted choices.

There's a couple of people on the list--Jon Stewart and Oprah Winfrey--who are indeed influential liberals who are "in U.S. media"...but if by "media" they don't mean journalism, why not include Steven Spielberg or Bruce Springsteen?  They're "in U.S. media" too.

Then there's the bloggers, who largely define themselves as not being part of the "MSM": Arianna Huffington, Kevin Drum, Glenn Greenwald, Ezra Klein, Matthew Yglesias, Markos Moulitsas Zuniga and Joshua Micah Marshall.

That leaves six people on the list of 25 who actually are liberal journalists with a regular platform in traditional U.S. media: the New Yorker's Hendrick Hertzberg; the Atlantic's James Fallows; Michael Pollan, a freelance writer for the New York Times; Times op-ed writer Paul Krugman; MSNBC's Rachel Maddow; and PBS's Bill Moyers. What does this say about the myth of the liberal media? Maybe the Hoover Institution can study that.

What would a real list of the most important progressive media figures look like? Feel free to leave suggestions in comments.

Chris Matthews reacting Bush's speech (as transcribed by the right-wing Media Research Center):

The idea that we have some brand new neo-conservative ideology of freedom that's going to bring peace over in that part of the world is not true, and he's still selling it, and that's the tragedy of the last eight years.

The very same Chris Matthews, reacting to a Saddam Hussein statue being pulled down in Baghdad (4/9/03):

We're all neo-cons now.

FAIR founder Jeff Cohen and longtime FAIR associate Norman Solomon have compiled their 17th annual list of "P.U.-litzer Prizes" (OpEd News, 12/18/08). Among this year's "stinkiest media performances":

HOT FOR OBAMA PRIZE -- MSNBC's Chris Matthews

This award sparked fierce competition, but the cinch came on the day Obama swept the Potomac Primary in February--when Chris Matthews spoke of "the feeling most people get when they hear Barack Obama's speech. My, I felt this thrill going up my leg. I mean, I don't have that too often."

BEYOND PARODY PRIZE--Fox News

In August, a FoxNews.com teaser for the O'Reilly Factor program said: "Obama bombarded by personal attacks. Are they legit? Ann Coulter comments."...

GUTTER BALL PUNDITRY AWARD -- Chris Matthews of MSNBC's Hardball

In program after program during the spring, Matthews repeatedly questioned whether Obama could connect with "regular" voters--"regular" meaning voters who are white or "who actually do know how to bowl." He once said of Obama: "This gets very ethnic, but the fact that he's good at basketball doesn't surprise anybody. But the fact that he's that terrible at bowling does make you wonder."

And there's plenty more malodorous journalism to be found in FAIR's extensive archive on corporate news coverage of the 2008 U.S. presidential election.

In "Clout Has Plunged for Automakers and Union, Too," the New York Times' Micheline Maynard makes this curious observation:

[GM CEO Rick ] Wagoner and Ron Gettelfinger, head of the U.A.W., appeared on local TV in Detroit this week, but no Detroit representatives landed spots on the Sunday morning talk shows out of Washington. Senator Levin was their primary spokesman on NBC's Meet the Press and Face the Nation on CBS.

While it might be odd for a CEO like Wagoner to have trouble getting on the TV talkshow circuit, the lack of a labor spokesperson on the Sunday shows is pretty much par for the course. It would have actually been really odd for a labor leader to be invited on a network chat show. From Extra!’s survey of Sunday morning guests in 1995-96 and 1999:

Except for presidential candidate Ralph Nader, not a single one of the 364 guests invited during the 19 months studied was an environmentalist or consumer advocate. John Sweeney and Thomas Donahue, candidates for the presidency of the AFL-CIO, were the only guests who were labor leaders. Instead of worker representatives, the shows invited the CEO of United Airlines, the CEO of Continental Airlines, a Goldman Sachs analyst, retired basketball stars and political satirists.

Or as MSNBC host Chris Matthews once put it:

I watch Sunday television.... I never see a really good articulate labor leader on television. What happened to the George Meanys and the Walter Reuthers we grew up with? Where are the strong, articulate voices of the working person, the working family out there? That voice that you're talking about, who worries about trade policy, who worries about tax policy, who worries about being trained for the job, where are those voices on Sunday?

And:

They don't have speakers. I'm telling you, I can't think right now of a labor leader that could match wits with a Dick Cheney on television. They don't want to get out there and debate like they used to.... Who are the great spokesmen against this administration's trade policies or this administration's tax policies? Who are they?

Of course, the idea that labor leaders--even those with Cheney-like wit--don't want to be on TV is strange. It's more likely that they're not being asked.

New York Times TV reporter Jim Rutenberg (11/2/08) tries to make a case that Fox News and MSNBC are (in Tom Rosenstiel's words) "reverse images of each other." Here are the actual quotes used by Rutenberg to demonstrate this supposed parallelism--first, Ann Coulter on Fox (10/30/08):

I feel like we are talking to the Germans after Hitler comes to power, saying, "Oh, well, I didn’t know."

And then Chris Matthews on MSNBC (10/29/08), addressing those who wouldn't vote for Obama because he's black:

He's been a good father, a good citizen, he's paid attention to his country.... Give the guy a break and think about voting for him.

Again, these are the quotes Rutenberg picks to show how similar the coverage on Fox and MSNBC is--one arguing that you shouldn't vote against a candidate based on his race, and the other comparing that candidate to a genocidal dictator.